Fatal Attraction: Nineteen Years in a Freezer — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential

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Megyn Kelly (1:06)

In the fall of 2004, a fledgling criminalist named Jennifer Francis gets to pick her next case from a stack on a colleague's desk. She has just been cleared to perform DNA analysis on her own. The stack holds DNA requests from detectives all over the Los Angeles Police Department. Jennifer is the newest analyst in the unit and the only one without a backlog. She goes through the stack looking for something simple. She finds a request on a 1986 murder in Van Nuys, a nurse. The detective who submitted it wrote that the victim's blood type was O and that type A blood had been recovered inside her home, blood that could not have been hers. Jennifer reads that and thinks, this one is easy. Pick a type A stain, pull the suspect's profile, run it against the national database, compare it to the victim, close the file. She takes the Sherri Rasmussen case.

The request Jennifer picked up has been waiting for more than a year. Cliff Shepard, a cold case detective, submitted it on September 19th, 2003, 17 years after the murder.

Shepard works in a unit the LAPD created in 2001 to go back through murders the city never solved, between 6,000 and 9,000 of them. Detectives spent a year just cutting that list down to the ones that still had evidence someone could test.

Sherri Rasmussen's case made that list because of one line in a report from 1986 Years later, Detective Shepard pointed it out to Dateline.

Cliff Shepard (2:47)

I saw that a bite swab had been collected by the coroner's office. It's okay, with that swab, there should be DNA.

Megyn Kelly (2:56)

Shepard attached two documents to his request. Detective Lyle Mayer's follow-up report from 1986 and the property log, meaning every item the LAPD booked into evidence in Sherri's case.

The property log contains 29 items. The bite mark swab is not one of them. So Cliff Shepard goes looking. The coroner's office tells him they do not have it.

Cliff Shepard (3:23)

I checked with our evidence room. They didn't have it.

I looked at our property reports. It's not booked.

SPEAKER_5 (3:30)

How could that happen?

Cliff Shepard (3:32)

Incompetence.

SPEAKER_5 (3:33)

That happened a lot?

Cliff Shepard (3:34)

Yes.

Megyn Kelly (3:35)

In 2003, Shepard takes a yellow highlighter to the sentence in Mayer's report describing the bite swab and writes a note in the margin asking where it is.

It is that handwritten note that newbie criminalist Jennifer Francis finds when she picks up the Sherri Rasmussen case for DNA analysis and reads Shepard's request. Jennifer calls Shepard herself and asks whether she can see some crime scene photographs. It's a normal request. Shepard offers her the murder book instead.

This is not normal. A murder book is the complete case file. There is only that one binder. It's irreplaceable. Detectives usually stay while an analyst reads it and then take it back. But Shepard tells Jennifer to keep it as long as she needs. A few days later, she comes back from lunch, and it is sitting on the center table of the lab. A blue three-ring binder. Jennifer shows a coworker, and she says, Check it out, she says, a real-life murder book. Then she starts reading it. Inside, Jennifer finds a security report from Glendale Adventist Medical Center, the hospital where Sherri Rasmussen worked. It describes a nurse Sherri turned down for a promotion. It says the hospital disciplined that nurse and her boyfriend, too, a doctor, after they made harassing phone calls to Sherri. By December 22, 2004, Jennifer has finished testing the items Shepard submitted for DNA analysis. Every sample comes back as belonging to Sherri Rasmussen. Three weeks of work, and all Jennifer has is the DNA profile of a woman everyone already knows is dead.